Arthur tried to speak, but no sound emerged. The air felt thick in his lungs.
She stepped closer. The warmth of her once so welcome. Now, the heat leached from her like smoke from a rumbling volcano, feverish and stifling.
“Always the romantic,” she laughed, as if it were something to be mocked and scorned. She was circling him slowly, her fingers trailing lightly over his shoulder, down his back and across his chest. “Even when I told you what I wanted. And you believed, didn’t you, Arthur? Believed that love could be enough. That charm and sentiment might be sufficient to feed my ambition.”
He turned to face her, his chest constricted and tried to find his voice. “I never knew—”
She stopped him with a single finger pressed against his lips. “Poor, dutiful, romantic Arthur. Poor darling. I almost feel sorry for you. You never listened. You never read between the lines.”
Her eyes flickered with something gleaming and inhuman.
“I wanted power, Arthur. Influence. Not love-soaked sonnets and sappy poetry. Not sketches of imagined futures. You were always such a ridiculous dreamer.”
Her voice echoed strangely, as though it were coming from all directions, carried on wind and shadow. There was something maddeningly eerie about it. It was her voice, and yet it wasn’t. It was an imposter wearing her likeness, but there was something wrong about the whole picture. Something that didn’t quite add up.
He reached for her hand, but she stepped into his embrace instead, in a possessive way that spoke of her need for his attention rather than a sense of desire. Her arms wound around his shoulders with a tenderness that did not match the venom in her words, but had never been a reality in the waking world.
He closed his eyes, relishing the moment while it lasted, burying his face in her golden hair. There was something different about her that gave him a vague hint of misplaced recognition; a flash of something he could not place. Something he didn’t associate with her.
When he drew back, there was another woman in his arms.
Abigail.
He knew not when the transformation had taken place, but the scent was different—fresher, softer, the familiar whisper of lavender and rosewater. Her gaze met his, hazel and luminous, but tainted by a hint of sorrow.
“Arthur,” she said, her voice gentler than the breeze. But she was already drifting away. There was a shadow behind her eyes. A quiet distance. A fragmented dispersal, like blossom petals blowing in the breeze and flying away before they could be caught.
His heart stuttered. Finally, he found his voice. “Abigail—”
But she shook her head, and moved just out of his grasp. “You waited too long.”
Her voice echoed—not as Sophia’s had, cruel and clanging—but hollow, like the final page of a book that had ended without a satisfactory conclusion.
“You couldn’t see the difference,” she said, her face blurring at the edges. “You believed the worst of me before you even gave me the chance to prove otherwise.”
“No—no, that’s not—”
“You feared love more than loneliness,” she whispered. “And now, I’m afraid you have it. Loneliness. Forever.”
Her words were without malice, but full of sadness, as though she couldn’t save him or herself from this lot.
He finally reached out to touch her, but her skin was cold beneath his hands. Her breath ceased to stir. Her body stiffened, then melted from his arms like smoke, drifting upward and away, until there was nothing left but the lingering scent of her perfume and the silence that followed.
And then, in the stillness, Sophia’s voice returned.
Not in front of him—but behind him. A tinkling laugh. A whisper at his ear.
“You see, darling. You never deserved either of us.”
Arthur turned.
She had been standing close enough so that he could feel her breath against his ear, but now she stood at the far end of the terrace, her eyes alight with a ghastly glee. Her gown had darkened, the gold stained with something shadowy and dripping, as though dipped in oil or old blood. Her smile stretched grotesquely, past the bounds of humanity.
“Not good enough to keep me. Not brave enough to fight for her. Poor, dear, Arthur.”
His chest heaved.
“You pretend to be the master of indifference,” she crooned, “but it’s only ever been fear. Fear of feeling. Fear of failing. And you will fail her, too, in the end. Youalwaysdo.”
